Moving to Mandrill to SparkPost this week? (A lot of us are thanks to this.)

In Mandrill (and possibly other transactional email services) we can use the API to send emails using templates. We send a bunch of information including recipients, content, metadata, and subject, ad we let ‘er fly. Boom, done.

For the most part, I’ve found SparkPost to be pretty similar, except on one point: subject lines. Specifically for emails sent using templates. When you’re using a template, several … Keep reading »

At least as of version 1.5.1, the awesome Vitalets Bootstrap X-Editable plugin has a maximum date for its datepickers of 2015. Why? I dunno. I just work here. But it’s a simple fix.

After you get things rolling by applying the plugin to whatever element, like so…
$(‘#thing’).editable();
Change the default maximum year thusly:
$.fn.combodate.defaults.maxYear = 2531;
Or whatever year you want.

While you’re there, you could also change the minimum date to something a little more recent than 1970:
$.fn.combodate.defaults.minYear = 2010;

If you’re like me, you don’t love it when your Mac makes that sign-in sound every time you open the lid. (Assuming you use iMessage/Messages for any IM services.) Here’s how to disable it. (And only it.)

Make sure Messages is closed.
Go to your Applications folder.
Find Messages.app and right-click it. Choose Show Package Contents.
Find the Resources folder.
Look for a file called Logged In.aiff.
Delete that mess.

Next time you open it, that sound will be gone. (Note: This may not work on El … Keep reading »

If you’re like me (and I know I am) you don’t love having a bunch of unnecessary stuff loaded when you don’t need it. Like Adobe’s Creative Cloud thingy. It can drain your battery (not by a lot, but still) and clutter up your menu bar.

Surprisingly, Apple has actually made this pretty easy. <aside>I’m enjoying the Tim Cook reign so far. But that’s a whole separate post.</aside> This works for Yosemite and El Capitan, and I’m assuming future versions too.

Make sure you have the installer downloaded from the app store. It will delete itself after you use it, but you can download it again.

Format an 8 GB flash drive and plug the thing in. Leaving it named “Untitled” is easiest, but you can change it. … Keep reading »

Some call it “bridge” mode. The point is you want your TP-LINK to play nice with another router from which your internet actually flows. Like if you have a fiber/DSL/psychic router you can’t replace because ISP reasons but you want some wifi that doesn’t totally suck. For example.

The reason this can be confusing with the Archer series is that many other routers have a setting like “AP mode” that you turn on and you’re done. Or Their WAN (a.k.a “internet”) … Keep reading »

Ok, if you’re reading this, I’m assuming you know what CORS means, so I won’t tell you that it stands for Cross Origin Resource Sharing. Or maybe I just told you.

Anyway, you want to enable it on your Apache server. Maybe, like me, you’re building an API-based web app. So you need some JavaScript to pull data from a remote server. (Or even, like in my case, a different subdomain on the same physical server.) It’s easy in … Keep reading »

So when a new version of any OS comes out, I like to do a clean install. On Macs, this has usually been fairly easy, since HFS+ partitions are pretty flexible — they’ll let you add/remove/resize without a lot of hassle.

Until Yosemite.

In the past, I’ve made a new partition on my drive, installed the new OS X (like Mavericks), copied all my files from the old partition to the new one. Once … Keep reading »

Windows batch files (.bat) can be scripted, which means you can do all sorts of things like setting variables. But if you’re having a hard time getting those variables to set, this might be why.
SET var=Holy crap, it sets the variable!
Will work fine, but…
SET var = Holy crap, the space screws it up!
… will not. If you’re used to putting spaces after equals signs like I am, you can make this mistake without even knowing it. If you do it … Keep reading »